Rose Under Fire (38 page)

I shook my head.

Anna shrugged. ‘Well, I’m expecting about ten years in prison. It’ll be interesting to see what Oberheuser gets. She was a witness at the International Military Tribunal before being put on trial here, so I feel like we have a lot in common.’

‘I guess it’d be good for you if she got acquitted.’

Anna laughed bitterly. ‘I damn well hope she doesn’t get acquitted! Evil bitch.’ She took a long drag on her cigarette. ‘Nice to share with you, Rose. Seems a little strange.’

Words cannot describe how strange it seemed. I just said, ‘I know. I have the same feeling eating dinner with Ró
ż
a.’

‘She’s one of the Rabbits? Which one?’

‘The one who looks like a little china doll. The one who didn’t testify.’

‘You were pretty lucky to have the Rabbits taking care of you at Ravensbrück, you know.’

‘I know it,’ I said with my teeth clenched together, because I was in danger of bursting into tears if I tried to talk normally. ‘My whole transport was gassed. The Rabbits hid me.’

‘Oh –’ Anna closed her eyes for a moment. ‘What, all the French girls on our work crew?’ She was silent for a moment. ‘God. Those poor kids.’

When she opened her eyes again I tried to shrug offhandedly, the way she had about going to prison, and couldn’t do it. I looked away, blinking. The attendant was knitting peacefully, oblivious to the intense conversation we were having – I suddenly realised that we were speaking English so she probably couldn’t understand us anyway.

‘How’d you get out, Anna?’ I asked.

‘I swapped my number for a dead woman’s – a Jehovah’s Witness. Lavender triangle, nobody ever pesters them. And I just kept moving from block to block. No one tries to count you when they think you’re dead! I was still there when the Russians turned up. I walked back to Berlin.’ Anna let out a long, smoke-filled breath. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to picture her
anywhere
but leaning against a porcelain washbasin and smoking.

‘Must be nice to be back in school,’ she went on. ‘I spent a year struggling to feed my miserable mother and my grandmother in one room, with no heat, and then the Yanks arrested me. It was kind of a relief. Mama’s having to pull her own weight now, and it’s about time too. Poor Mama.’ Another long drag. ‘Everybody got raped when the Soviets took Germany.
Everybody.
I turned up in Berlin not long after they got there, and Mama had stopped going out. She was letting her mother forage for both of them – this seventy-three-year-old woman out on the streets in the rubble, selling herself to Russian soldiers in exchange for bread.
Gott im Himmel.
’ Anna took a deep, shaking breath. ‘Makes Ravensbrück look civilised. I put a stop to that. Found work for Mama too, a good office job, work
I
should have taken, keeping accounts for a small building company that’s been taken over by the Soviets. I guess she’s all right now because she sends me packages.’

‘My gosh, Anna.’

‘I wonder what those American judges
think
,’ Anna said fiercely. ‘What are they
thinking
when those girls get up and tell them about what happened to them? The soldier boys are OK. They’ve seen things. They have some idea. But sometimes I really feel like everything is so
fucking
unfair. What gives those old men the right to guess what I’ve seen – what I’ve had to do? The right to judge me?’

She stubbed out her cigarette in the sink. The attendant sighed, tutted and put down her knitting. She heaved herself to her feet again and pushed the ashtray that was sitting on the little dressing table right next to her a little closer to Anna, then turned on the tap and swooshed out the sink. Anna lit another cigarette.

‘How’d you make your mother go to work, when she was too scared to leave the house?’ I asked.

‘Forced her,’ Anna said. ‘I mean, I really forced her. Pulled her out the door, pushed her down the stairs. I’m a
Kolonka
– green triangle, red armband, I know how to bully people, remember?’ She laughed bitterly. ‘Every morning for a month, till she started coming along without a fight. I fought her and fought
for
her too. I wouldn’t let anyone touch her. She’s better now – she made friends with the woman who runs the canteen where she works, and they visit each other – you know, play cards, darn socks, gossip about their terrible daughters. She gets up and eats every day. And you
have
to, you know? You can’t just sit in a corner weeping or you’ll
die
.’

She looked over at me suddenly. ‘You
know
, Rose. You’ve seen people do it. You’ve seen what happens.’

I have seen it.

‘I don’t know . . .’ Anna shook her head. ‘Maybe I did the wrong thing. Maybe I was too hard on her. But I had to do something. I had to get her going.’

‘Anna – is there anything I can send you? Anything I can
do
for you?’

‘Well . . .’ Her face hardened in its cynical frown. ‘Bah. Bribe the judges?’ Then she smiled a little, hesitantly, like it was something she wasn’t used to doing. ‘Look, if I ever get out of prison, and we’re ever in the same place at the same time again, I wish you’d take me flying.’

I stubbed out my own cigarette in the ashtray and held out my hand. She took it.

‘
Deal
,’ I said forcefully. ‘Scout’s honour. I will take you flying.’

‘I am looking forward to it already,’ Anna said warmly.

There’s got to be power somewhere. The engine has to turn the propeller, and something has to start the engine. Someone has to lift the kite, maybe run with it. A bird has to beat its wings. Things don’t magically take off and fly just because it’s a little windy.

I spent twenty minutes on the telephone at the reception desk in the hotel, driving everybody crazy because I had to make someone translate for me whenever an operator came on. But I finally got through to the Operations hut at the temporary European Air Transport airfield where I’d landed nearly a week ago. I knew they were doing supply runs all the time, keeping Nuremberg stocked for the lawyers and soldiers and newspapermen.

‘Yes, I know they’re not supposed to take me back to Paris till Monday, but is anyone going anywhere tomorrow?
Anywhere?
Taking reconnaissance pictures or something? I just wanted to come along for the flight. We don’t need to land –’

‘Let me put you on the line with a pilot, honey,’ the disembodied, gum-cracking American voice said kindly. ‘You’re Roger Justice’s niece, right? Yeah, we heard all about you. How’s the trial going?’ She laughed. Fortunately she didn’t give me time to try to answer – I think she was just being polite and didn’t really want to know. ‘I got somebody here you can talk to –’

‘Hello?’

She’d handed the phone over. The voice was gruff.

‘Can’t get enough of joyriding in the C-47s, huh?’

It was Chuck Brewster, who’d flown the plane from Paris. I’d told him my story about buzzing the Eiffel Tower on VE Day and I’m not sure he believed me – I’m
sure
he didn’t believe I’d been flying longer than he had, which is also true. He was a serious guy – neither one of us suggested he let me take over the controls for the fun of it – but we got along all right.

‘Well, you’re in luck, Miss Justice, because I’m doing a run down to Ronchi dei Legionari in Italy tomorrow morning to pick up Christmas dinner for this outfit.’

I laughed. ‘
Christmas dinner?
’

‘Yep, a couple of hundred frozen turkeys straight from a farm in Connecticut, plus, would you believe it, a dozen Christmas trees and all the trimmings, waiting at the docks at Monfalcone for the GIs camping out here over the holidays. You can come along if you want – it’s about an hour and a half down, another hour and a half back. Plus a few hours there while they load her up. You can go to the beach!’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Nah, I’m serious! We’ll get someone to run you to the beach while we pack up. Right on the Adriatic Sea.’

For a moment I couldn’t talk – I could hardly breathe.

In my head I heard the voice of my murdered friend Karolina, whispering an impossible fantasy in my ear as we lay clutching each other for warmth on the filthy wooden bunks of Ravensbrück:
Let’s go to the beach on the beautiful Adriatic Sea.

‘Hello? Hello?’ came Chuck’s voice. ‘You still there, Miss Justice? Bet you weren’t expecting to spend the first day of winter on the Adriatic, were you?’

I let out my breath in a gasp. I didn’t cry.

Instead I asked brazenly, ‘Can I bring a friend?’

I shamed Ró
ż
a into coming with me to the airfield.

‘You know the story I used to tell about how my boyfriend Nick was going to come and rescue us in a little plane – he’d land in the middle of the
Lagerstrasse
and we’d all fly away to the beach? You and I are going to fly to the beach today.’

‘It’s December!’

‘OK, no red bathing suits this time. That’ll have to wait till I can take you to the Conewago Grove Lake. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We have to do it for
Karolina.
’

I was brutal. I didn’t hit Ró
ż
a. I didn’t touch her. But I was brutal.

‘Karolina was gassed instead of me, she took my place, she took my number, but she didn’t do it for me, Ró
ż
yczka, and you know it. She did it for
you.
She did it so I could get you out of Ravensbrück and you could tell the world what they did to you – what they did to
Karolina.
She wasn’t as permanently damaged as you, but she still got a paper cone full of bacteria sewn into her leg and ended up so swollen with infection she couldn’t walk for eight months –’

Ró
ż
a was clenching her fists.

‘I
know
what they did to Karolina,’ I went on mercilessly. ‘I know exactly what they did to every single one of the Rabbits. It’s all been recorded by the people you work for, and maybe you haven’t read the specific reports, but I have, because they’re all part of Dr Alexander’s evidence. Karolina could have told the world herself. She’d be making newsreels about it – people would be using her work as evidence too! She could have left me to be gassed with the rest of my transport, and she’d have stood up there in front of that tribunal and
showed
everybody what happened. But
you didn’t.
And I’m not blaming you for that, but you are darned well flying to the beach with me. Because Karolina was going to and she’s dead and you’re coming along in her place.’

By the time I’d finished, Ró
ż
a was crouched in a heap on the floor of our room, bent over her knees with her face in her hands. All I could see of her were her round shoulders in their sensible grey wool and the short, fluffy waves of caramel-gold perm. But she wasn’t crying; her shoulders weren’t shaking. She was thinking.

After a few seconds, when she was pretty sure I’d finished, she sat up and looked me in the eye.

‘The Ravensbrück trial in Hamburg’s not over yet,’ she said. ‘Tell the world yourself, Rose Justice! I know, you’ve got all these poems published and you’re doing a story for your magazine, big damn deal. You sit in your room all alone at your typewriter, with no one watching if it makes you cry, and you take it to the post office and no one even knows what you’re sending. How hard is that to do?
I
could do that. I’ve
done
that. My written testimony is part of the Lund files too, you know.
NO.
If you want me to go flying with you for
Karolina
, you will damn well
go to Hamburg
for Karolina.’

It was my turn to feel like I’d been punched in the stomach and she saw it in my face. Ró
ż
a let out one of her familiar, maniacal cackles. ‘You won’t even have to take your clothes off!’

‘I’ve already said no,’ I said faintly.

‘Bah. Bribe the judges.’

Which is exactly what Anna had said.

And suddenly it became like so many decisions I’d made during the war:
I didn’t have a choice.
I had to do it whether I wanted to or not. Not just for Karolina, who was dead, but also for Anna, who was still alive and had no one to defend her.

You only fly straight and level in
balance.

Anna and Ró
ż
a are the opposing forces that perfectly balance each other to keep me in the air.

It was harder to get the words out this time than the easy promise I’d made to Anna in the washroom in the Palace of Justice.

‘You’ve got a deal,’ I gasped.

Ró
ż
a and I got up at the crack of dawn and shared a car with a couple of BBC reporters who were heading out that day with a lot of equipment. They wouldn’t let us help them carry anything, and one of them actually went out of his way to take Ró
ż
a’s arm and help her across the churned slush to the makeshift Operations building at the airfield, which meant he had to do two trips – but sometimes you have to just give up being independent and graciously accept the kindness that’s offered you. And anyway, this was without a doubt the sorriest excuse for an airfield I have ever seen, even counting the one they knocked up at Camp Los Angeles right after Reims was liberated. I guess that is our own fault for bombing Nuremberg’s real airfield to smithereens.

I’m painting a scene of gloom, but in fact it was a glorious,
glorious
day – crystal clear and breezy. There had been another inch or so of snow overnight so folks were frantically clearing a very narrow path up the runway. Chuck produced flight suits for us, which for some reason made Ró
ż
a laugh her head off – her real laugh, which I’d hardly ever heard in all the time I’d known her, bubbly as champagne. ‘Are we going to go skiing?’ she asked.

‘Why skiing?’

‘My mother used to put me in this awful snowsuit – baggy legs just like this, four sizes too big for me, and it was
purple.
She’d roll up the legs and hold them in place with rubber bands.’

I’d never heard her talk about her mother either.